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How To Make Sure Homework Really Helps (a.k.a.: “Retrieval Practice Fails”)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August-14-2022

How To Make Sure Homework Really Helps (a.k.a.: “Retrieval Practice Fails”)

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Most research focuses narrowly on just a few questions. For instance:

“Does mindful meditation help 5th grade students reduce anxiety?”

“How many instructions overwhelm college students’ working memory?”

“Do quizzes improve attention when students learn from online videos?”

Very occasionally, however, just one study results in LOTS of teaching advice. For instance, this recent research looks at data from ELEVEN YEARS of classroom teaching.

Student Doing Homework with Laptop

Professor Arnold Glass (writing with Mengxue Kang) has been looking at the benefits of various teaching strategies since 2008.

For that reason, he can draw conclusions about those strategies. AND, he can draw conclusions about changes over time.

The result: LOTS of useful guidance.

Here’s the story…

The Research

Glass has been teaching college courses in Memory and Cognition for over a decade. Of course, he wants to practice what he preaches. For instance:

First, when Glass’s students learn about concepts, he begins by asking them to make plausible predictions about the topics they’re going to study.

Of course, his students haven’t studied the topic yet, so they’re unlikely to get the answers right. But simply thinking about these questions helps them remember the correct answers that they do learn.

In research world, we often call this strategy “pretesting” or “prequestions.”

Second, after students learn the topics, he asks them to answer questions about them from memory.

That is: he doesn’t want them to look up the correct answers, but to try and remember the correct answers.

In research world, we call this technique “retrieval practice” or “the testing effect.”

Third, Glass spreads these questions out over time. His students don’t answer retrieval practice questions once; they do so several times.

In research world, we call this technique “spacing.”

Because Glass connects all those pretesting and retrieval practice questions to exam questions, he can see which strategies benefit.

And, because he’s been tracking data for years, he can see how those benefits change over time.

The Results: Good & Bad

Obviously, Glass’s approach generates LOTS of results. So, let’s keep things simple.

First Headline: these strategies work.

Pretesting and retrieval practice and spacing all help students learn.

These results don’t surprise us, but we’re happy to have confirmation.

Second Headline: but sometimes these strategies don’t work.

In other words: most of the time, students get questions right on the final exam more often than they did for the pretesting and the retrieval practice.

But, occasionally, students do better on the pretest question (or the retrieval practice question) than on the final exam.

Technically speaking, that result is BIZARRE.

How can Glass explain this finding?

Tentative Explanations, Alarming Trends

Glass and Kang have a hypothesis to explain this “bizarre” finding. In fact, this study explores their hypothesis.

Glass’s students answer the “pretesting” questions for homework. What if, instead of speculating to answer those pretesting questions, the students look the answer up on the interwebs?

What if, instead of answering “retrieval practice” questions by trying to remember, the students look up the answers?

In these cases, the students would almost certainly get the answers right — so they would have high scores on these practice exercises.

But they wouldn’t learn the information well, so they would have low scores on the final exam.

So, pretesting and retrieval practice work if students actually do it.

But if the students look up answer instead of predicting, they don’t get the benefits of prequestions.

If they look up the answer instead of trying to remember, they don’t get the benefit of retrieval practice.

And, here’s the “alarming trend”: the percentage of students who look up the answers has been rising dramatically.

How dramatically? In 2008, it was about 15%. In 2018, it was about 50%.

Promises Fulfilled

The title of the blog post promises to make homework helpful (and to point out when retrieval practice fails).

So, here goes.

Retrieval practice fails when students don’t try to retrieve.

Homework that includes retrieval practice won’t help if students look up the answers.

So, to make homework help (and to get the benefits of retrieval practice), we should do everything we reasonably can to prevent this shortcut.

Three strategies come quickly to mind.

First: don’t just use prequestions and retrieval practice. Instead, explain the logic and the research behind them. Students should know: they won’t get the benefits if they don’t do the thinking.

Second: as must as is reasonably possible, make homework low-stakes or no-stakes. Students have less incentive to cheat if doing so doesn’t get them any points. (And, they know that it harms their learning.)

Third: use class time for both strategies.

In other words: we teachers ultimately can’t force students to “make educated predictions” or “try to remember” when they’re at home. But we can monitor them in class to ensure they’re doing so.

These strategies, to be blunt, might not work well as homework — especially not at the beginning of the year. We should plan accordingly.

TL;DR

Prequestions and retrieval practice do help students learn, but only if students actually do the thinking these strategies require.

We teachers should be realistic about our students’ homework habits and incentives, and design assignments that nudge them in the right directions.

 

Glass, A. L., & Kang, M. (2022). Fewer students are benefiting from doing their homework: an eleven-year study. Educational Psychology, 42(2), 185-199.

Possible Selves in STEM: Helping Students See Themselves as Scientists
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-08-2020

Possible Selves in STEM: Helping Students See Themselves as Scientists

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Why don’t more students sign up for STEM classes, and enter STEM careers?

Could we increase the number, and the diversity within that group?

Researchers in California came up with a simple strategy: one that offered powerful results.

Here’s the story…

Possible Selves

This research team, let by Jeffry Schinske, wondered if students avoided science classes because they simply couldn’t see themselves as scientists.

“I am this kind of person,” students might think. “Scientists are that kind of person. I’ll just never belong.”

To push back against this false belief, Schinske’s team tried a straightforward strategy. Their biology students learned not only from a textbook, but also from primary sources. By learning course information from a broadly diverse range of scientists, these students expanded their sense of who scientists might be.

That is: they might learn about neurobiology by studying the work of Dr. Ben Barres. In this way, students learned about diseases of the nervous system and about trans scientists. (If you’re interested in Barres’s remarkable story, we introduced him on this blog a few years ago.)

They didn’t learn about biology concepts as a series of abstract truths. Instead, they learned about these topics through the people (Black or White or Asian or Hispanic; gay or straight; cis or trans; on the spectrum; funny or serious) who investigate them.

In other words: Schinske’s team wanted to increase their students’ sense of possible selves by showing scientists who resembled them.

Results?

Sure enough, this strategy worked. A few key findings.

Compared to students in an active control condition, students who did this “Scientist Spotlight” homework…

… thought of scientists in less stereotypical ways,

… felt they could individually relate to scientists as people like themselves (and felt that way for at least 6 months),

… felt more interested in science, and

… got higher grades.

Because of the study design, not all these findings are causal. That is, Shinske doesn’t claim that the Scientist Spotlight caused the higher grades.

But, it’s an intriguing possibility — especially because it doesn’t take additional time for either students or teachers.

In Their Own Words

More than most research, this study includes passages from surveys that the students completed. The students’ own words helpfully communicate the power of this technique. For instance,

For my whole life I … wasn’t exposed to any scientist who was of African American descent. That, as a fellow African American, brought me joy as it shows that African Americans are no longer abiding to the negative stigma we have. She’s representing a powerful positing for us and  people have noticed her work. It gave me incentive to push for my own dreams and to succeed.

Or

I found this Ted Talk with Charles Limb incredibly interesting mostly because I am a musician myself who has been trained both classically and in jazz.

Or

Before I learned about scientists in this class, I thought scientists were like “nerds” or what they show in movies. The characters would be very geeky, had glasses, spoke monotone, and thought they were above everyone. However, through all the research I’ve done in this class, scientists are just normal people like myself. They love to learn new things, they have a life outside the laboratory, they are fun … My opinion of people who do science has completely changed thanks to this class.

Clearly, this strategy strongly influenced these (and many other) students.

If you try this out with your own scientists, please let me know what you find!

Research Summary: The Best and Worst Highlighting Strategies
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-13-2019

Research Summary: The Best and Worst Highlighting Strategies

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Does highlighting help students learn?

As is so often the case, the answer is: it depends.

highlighting

The right kind of highlighting can help. But, the wrong kind doesn’t help. (And, might hurt.)

And, most students do the wrong kind.

Today’s Research Summary

Over at Three Star Learning Experiences, Tim Surma & Co. offer a helpful overview of highlighting research.

The headlines: highlighting helps students if the highlight the right amount of the right information.

Right amount: students tend to highlight too much. This habit reduces the benefit of highlighting, for several reasons.

Highlighting can help if the result is that information “pops out.” If students highlight too much, then nothing pops out. After all, it’s all highlighted.

Highlighting can help when it prompts students to think more about the reading. When they say “this part is more important than that part,” this extra level of processing promotes learning. Too much highlighting means not enough selective processing.

Sometimes students think that highlighting itself is studying. Instead, the review of highlighted material produces the benefits. (Along with the decision making before-hand.)

Right information.

Unsurprisingly, students often don’t know what to highlight. This problem shows up most often for a) younger students, and b) novices to a topic.

Suggestions and Solutions

Surma & Co. include several suggestions to help students highlight more effectively.

For instance, they suggest that students not highlight anything until they’ve read everything. This strategy helps them know what’s important.

(I myself use this technique, although I tend to highlight once I’ve read a substantive section. I don’t wait for a full chapter.)

And, of course, teachers who teach highlighting strategies explicitly, and who model those strategies, will likely see better results.

Surma’s post does a great job summarizing and organizing all this research; I encourage you to read the whole thing.

You might also check out John Dunlosky’s awesome review of study strategies. He and his co-authors devote lots of attention to highlighting, starting on page 18. They’re quite skeptical about its benefits, and have lots to contribute to the debate.

For other suggestions about highlighting, especially as a form of retrieval practice, click here.

 

“Wait Just a Minute!”: The Benefits of Procrastination?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-08-2019

“Wait Just a Minute!”: The Benefits of Procrastination?

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“A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today.”

procrastination

This quotation, attributed to Karen Lamb, warns us about the dangers of procrastination. Presumably our students would propose a slightly modified version:

“The night before the test, I’ll wish I had started studying today.”

Does procrastination ever help? Is there such a thing as “beneficial procrastination”?

Types of Procrastination

I myself was intrigued when recently asked this question.

(True story: I was the President-To-Be of the Procrastinators’ Society in my high school. I would surely have been elected, but we never scheduled the meeting.)

Sure enough, researchers have theorized that we procrastinate for different reasons and in different ways.

Many of us, of course, procrastinate because we can’t get ourselves organized to face the task ahead.

(Mark Twain assures us he never put off until tomorrow that which he could do the day after tomorrow.)

Danya Corkin and colleagues wondered about another kind of deliberate procrastination: something they call “active delay.”

Active delay includes four salient features:

First, students intentionally decide to postpone their work. It’s not a haphazard, subconscious process.

Second, they like working under pressure.

Third — unlike most procrastinators — they get the work done on time.

Fourth, they feel good about the whole process.

What did Corkin & Co. find when they looked for these distinct groups?

The Benefits of “Active Delay”

As is often the case, they found a mixed bag of results.

To their surprise, procrastinators and active delayers adopted learning strategies (rehearsal, elaboration, planning, monitoring) roughly equally.

Unsurprisingly, procrastinators generally followed unproductive motivational pathways. (If you follow Carol Dweck’s work, you know about the dangers of “performance goals” and “avoidance goals.”)

And, the big headline: procrastination led to lower grades. Active delay led to higher grades.

Classroom Implications

This research gives teachers a few points to consider.

First: both kinds of procrastination might look alike to us. However, they might lead to quite different results.

Even if students procrastinate from our perspective, we can distinguish between two categories of procrastination. And, we should worry less about “active delay” than good, old-fashioned putting stuff off because I can’t deal with it.

Second: even though “active delay” leads to more learning than “procrastination,” both probably produce less learning than well-scheduled learning.

As we know from many researchers, spreading practice out over time (interleaving) yields more learning than bunching it all together.

Active delay might not be as bad, but it’s still bad for learning.

Finally: if you’re an “active delayer,” you might forgive yourself. As long as you’re choosing delay as a strategy — especially because you work best under pressure — then this flavor of procrastination needn’t bring on a bout of guilt.

Me: I’m going to watch some football…

New Year, New Habits: More Learning!
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-29-2018

New Year, New Habits: More Learning!

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When the school year starts back up in January, teachers would LOVE to use this fresh start for good.

new learning habits

In particular, our students might have developed some counter-productive habits during the first half of the year. Wouldn’t it be great if we could help them develop new learning habits?

Maybe homework would be a good place to start. Better homework habits should indeed lead to more learning.

The Problem: Old Habits

When I sit down to do my homework, the same problems always crop up.

My cell phone buzzes with texts.

I’m really tired. SO tired.

The abominable noise from my brother’s room (heavy metal horror) drives me crazy.

I try to solve all these problems when they appear, but they get me so distracted and addled that I just can’t recover quickly. Result: I’m just not very efficient.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could develop new habits to solve these problems? What would these new learning habits be?

New Learning Habits: “Implementation Intentions”

We actually have a highly effective habit strategy to deal with this problem. Sadly, the solution has a lumpish name: “implementation intentions.”

Here’s what that means.

Step 1: I make a list of the problems that most often vex me. (In fact, I’ve already made that list — see above.)

Important note about step 1: everyone’s list will be different. The problems that interfere with my homework might not bother other people. (Apparently, some folks like my brother’s dreadful music.)

Step 2: decide, IN ADVANCE, how I will solve each problem.

For example, when my cell phone buzzes, I won’t look at the message. Instead, I will turn the phone to airplane mode.

When I feel tired, I’ll do 20 jumping jacks. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take a quick shower. That always wakes me right up.

When my brother cranks his stereo, I’ll move to my backup study location in the basement.

Just as everyone faces different problems, everyone will come up with different solutions.

Step 3: let the environment do the work.

Here’s the genius of “implementation intentions”: the environment does the work for us.

Now, when my phone buzzes, I already know what to do. I’ve already made the decision. I don’t have to make a new decision. I simply execute the plan.

Phone buzzes, I switch it to airplane mode. Done.

New Learning Habits: the Research

Now, I have to be honest with you. When I first read about this strategy, I was REALLY SKEPTICAL.

I mean, it’s so simple. How can this possibly work?

The theory — “the environment does the work, activating a decision chain that’s already been planned” — sort of makes sense, but: really?

In fact, we do have lots of good research showing that this strategy works.

For instance, Angela Duckworth (yes, that Angela Duckworth) found that students who went through this process completed 60% more practice problems for the PSAT than those who simply wrote about their goals for the test.

You read that right: 60% more practice problems.

How’s that for new learning habits?

Classroom Applications

What does this technique look like in your classroom?

Of course: everyone reading this blog teaches different content to different students at different schools. And, we are all different people.

So, your precise way of helping your students will differ from my way.

I’m including a link to Ollie Lovell’s post on this topic. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you follow his example precisely. After all, you and Ollie are two different people.

However, I am suggesting that his example helpfully illustrates the concept. And, it will give you ideas on how best to apply it in your world.

The Great Homework Debate: Working Memory Disadvantage?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-07-2018

The Great Homework Debate: Working Memory Disadvantage?

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Here at Learning and the Brain, we think a lot about the great homework debate.

homework debate

Some scholars rail against homework. Some schools are doing away with it. However, other researchers champion its benefits.

What can brain researchers contribute to this discussion? Knowing what we know about brains and minds, how can we reconsider this argument?

Working Memory in Schools

All academic learning depends on a crucial cognitive capacity: working memory — often abbreviated as WM.

WM allows students to hold pieces of information in mind, while simultaneously reorganizing or combining them.

Clearly, students use WM all the time. For example:

Performing mathematical operations.

Following instructions.

Applying literary terminology.

Combining letters into new words.

Comparing famous figures.

Using scientific principles in new situations.

All these mental operations — and many, many more — require students to hold and process information simultaneously. Whenever students hold and process, they use WM.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have very much of this essential cognitive capacity. As a simple test: you can probably alphabetize the five days of the work week in your head. (Go ahead — try it!)

But, you probably can’t alphabetize the twelve months of the year. Why? You just don’t have enough WM. (Don’t worry: almost nobody does.)

Working Memory and the Homework Debate

A just-published study by Ashley Miller and Nash Unsworth points to a possible connection between WM and our views on homework.

Imagine, for instance, I give my students a list of random words to learn. Later, I ask them to recall words from that list. As you can imagine, the longer the list, the harder that task will be.

As it turns out, a student’s WM influences her performance on that task. The lower her WM, the more she will struggle to recall all those words.

The Miller and Unsworth study adds a crucial twist. As students see the same word list more and more often, the difference between high-WM students and low-WM students gets smaller.

In some ways of measuring, in fact, it simply goes away.

Put simply: repetitive practice can eliminate this functional difference between high-WM and low-WM students.

What’s another name for “repetitive practice”? Homework.

In other words, homework designed in a particular way might help students who traditionally struggle in school. Although a relatively low WM typically makes learning very difficult, a well-structured assignment might ease some of those difficulties.

If teachers could make cognitive life easier for low-WM students, we’d be going a long way to making school more fair and beneficial.

Caveats (Of Course)

First: this argument says that the right kind of homework can help some students. Of course, the wrong kind of homework won’t. In fact, it might be a detriment to most students.

Second: Miller and Unsworth’s study suggests that repetitive practice can reduce the effect of WM differences. However, teachers might struggle to make “repetitive practice” anything other than really, really dull. We’ll need to be insightful and imaginative to ensure that the solution to one problem doesn’t create a new problem.

Third: To be clear: Miller & Unsworth don’t say that their research has implications for assigning homework. However, as I thought over their findings, it seemed the most direct application of this study in a school setting.

Finally: Teachers might object: we rarely ask students to recall random words. This research paradigm simply doesn’t apply to our work.

And yet, we face an awkward truth.

The words that our students learn might not seem random to us, but they nonetheless often seem random to our students.

We know why the words “chlorophyll,” “stomata,” and “Calvin Cycle” are related to each other. However, until our students understand photosynthesis, even that brief list might feel quite random to them.

Words and ideas that live comfortably in teachers’ long-term memory systems must be processed in our students’ WM systems. The right kind of homework just might make that processing easier.

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May-24-2018

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?

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Does a mother’s homework help benefit her children? Do they study better? Do they learn more?

mother's homework help

Over the years, researchers have found conflicting answers to these questions.

Perhaps that conflict results from the different kinds of “help” that mothers might provide. Researchers in Finland wanted to find out.

Asking the Right Questions

Jaana Viljaranta and her colleagues worked with several hundred 2nd-4th graders, their mothers, and their teachers.

(The researchers don’t explain why they focus on mothers. I imagine they assume that mothers offer more help than fathers, and – to be precise – focus on “maternal behavior” rather than “parental behavior.”)

Rather than simply ask “do you help your children with their homework,” they had mothers rate themselves in three categories.

Perhaps these mothers provide actual help or guidance.

Perhaps they simply check to see if their child has done the homework.

Or, perhaps they “grant autonomy”; that is, “trust that the child takes care of home assignments by him/herself.”

They looked for a connection between these self-ratings and two results.

First, what effect did this maternal behavior have on task-persistence? They had teachers answer questions like “does the student actively attempt to solve even difficult situations and tasks?”

And second: what effect did it have on students’ learning? Here, researchers used a standard measurement of reading and math skill – not the students’ grades.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Finding the Answers

Because researchers measured so many variables, they’ve got a lot of potential relationships to map.

The short version is:

When mothers help with homework, children are less task-persistent on their own.

When mothers grant autonomy, children are more task-persistent.

And, when mothers check that homework got done, that doesn’t influence task-persistence either way.

(These three findings apply to 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th.)

In turn, increased task persistence suggested higher grades, and decreased task persistence suggested lower grades. (For both those findings, the results didn’t quite achieve statistical significance.)

In sum: help doesn’t help. Granting autonomy does.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Explaining the Answers

Why is this so? Why doesn’t homework help help?

The Finnish researchers based their study on a well-known theory about motivation: Self-Determination Theory. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan argue that people are motivated by a desire for three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Viljaranta and colleagues reason thus: when mothers help their children with homework, they reduce their child’s autonomy, and imply that they think their children lack necessary competence.

By holding back from helping, on the other hand, mothers boost their children’s sense of autonomy. They also show that they believe their children can get the work done on their own.

By promoting autonomy and competence, these mothers help their children develop intrinsic motivation, and thereby improve task persistence.

Not Too Fast…

All research has limitations, and we should keep this study’s limitations in mind.

This is only one study.

It was done in a very particular cultural context. (Grade school in Finland.)

And: researchers found a task-persistence effect only in 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th. (And, they didn’t find statistically significant difference in learning at any point.)

Finally: researchers report on averages. Your child isn’t average.

Even if many (or most) children benefit when they get autonomy, others just might need some more support.

Research can help inform our decisions, but we must make those decisions one child at a time.

Addendum

After I wrote the post above, I discussed this research with a colleague who teachers in Finland. He responds thus:

The conclusion of the study may contain a cultural bias [as all research does — editor’s note.] Generally speaking, parents in Finland are quite hands off with schools — the very opposite of helicopter parenting. There is also a cultural preference for developing independence from a young age.

In other words: “granting autonomy” is already a cultural norm in Finland in ways that it might not be elsewhere. This background might influence our understanding of this research.

Homework Improves Conscientiousness: Do You Believe It?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March-29-2018

Homework Improves Conscientiousness: Do You Believe It?

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Teachers have many reasons to assign homework. In particular, we want our students to practice whatever they’re learning, so they can get better at it.

homework improves conscientiousness

We might also plausibly hope that homework benefits students in other ways. Perhaps it helps them get more organized. Perhaps it involves parents in learning. Or, perhaps homework improves conscientiousness.

This last option seems especially intriguing.

Obviously, conscientiousness improves the likelihood that students will do homework. But, does that causal process flow the other way? Do people who do more homework become more conscientious?

Promising Signs

To answer that question, several researchers gathered data from German middle school students, and — crucially — their parents.

Then, they crunched a lot of numbers. I mean, A LOT of numbers.

Early results showed that, for these middle schoolers, homework effort and conscientiousness change in tandem. More specifically, both homework effort and conscientiousness increased from 5th to 7th grades, and then declined quite sharply from 7th to 8th grades.

(My condolences to 8th grade teachers.)

These correlations also appeared when analyzing parents’ points of view. Like their children, they saw that the effort going in to homework correlated with their children’s conscientiousness in other areas of life.

Researchers then ramped up their analytical methodology to explore causal direction. They used a particular statistical method to contrast students whose effort did not go up with those who did, and to compare their conscientiousness levels.

Is it true that doing more homework improves conscientiousness? Here is their summary:

We are willing to tentatively propose that changing one’s homework effort may lead to changes in conscientiousness, but obviously, this inference and our results await more rigorous testing.

In other words: based on the data they have and the methods they can use, it seems so. But, these methods have limits, so we need to explore this question further.

Homework Improves Conscientiousness: Not So Fast…

This study appeals to me because its authors recognize not only the limits of their methods, but also the limitations of its implications.

For instance, teachers might conclude “if homework improves conscientiousness, then we should all assign more homework. It will be good for them, and not just their learning.”

NOT SO FAST, the authors respond.

First, not all students do the homework we assign. After all, in the dry language of research, they note that “students differ in the extent to which they ascribe value to the activity of doing homework.” (Ain’t that the truth…)

Second, an increase in homework might (might!) increase conscientiousness, but it might harm other important things: like, say, happiness, or relationships with peers.  Conscientiousness is an important part of life, but it’s not the only important part of life.

What’s Next

Reasonably enough, these researchers call for more investigation of this question. In particular, they hope for a study that controls the amount of homework that students do, and learns from what happens next.

(The current study, remember, simply looks at what students did.)

But what should we teachers do because of this research?

Schools are having a healthy and important debate right now about the benefits of homework. (For earlier posts on this topic, click here and here.) Reasonably enough, we want to ensure that its benefits outweigh its potential harms: lost time, increased stress.

This research encourages us to remember the non-academic benefits of homework. If we cut back on practice problems, what can teachers and parents do in their stead to help young children develop the healthy characteristics essential for a productive adult life?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that’s an important question.

No Homework in the Orchard
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April-05-2017

No Homework in the Orchard

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AdobeStock_85738750_Credit

The Washington Post reports on [edit] Orchard School in South Burlington, VT, [a PK-5 school in Orchard, VT] which no longer assigns homework. Instead — and this is a crucial “instead” — it does urge students and families to read together. Also, it discourages students from adding to screen time, exhorting them to go outside and play.

The school isn’t keeping systematic data (as far as I can tell), but so far they’ve got positive anecdotes — balanced by a few concerns.

For a more research-driven approach to this question, see this earlier post.

[Editor’s note: my thanks to an astute reader who points out there is no such place as Orchard, VT. “Orchard” is the name of the school, not the town.]